“For God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love’s sake.”
In Browning’s “One Way of Love” (p. [150]) the iambics in the first lines express determination and endeavor, but there is a decided change in the metric movement caused by the agitation, disappointment, and deep feeling of the last two lines of each stanza.
It is never possible to study metre in cold blood. It is the language of the heart. Only an occasional versifier in a critical or intellectual spirit grinds out a machine-made metre, every foot of which can be scanned according to rule.
A poem which is written seemingly in one metric measure will be found, when read aloud with proper feeling, to have several. Contrast the last stanza with the third from the last of “In a Year” (p. [201]), and one feels that the third from the last has the stronger iambic movement. This possibly expresses hope, or impetuous longing, while the last, returning to the trochee, expresses intense despair. At any rate, these two stanzas cannot be read alike. Of course, a different conception on the part of the reader would affect the metre. The interpreter must take such hints as he finds, complete them by his imagination, and so assimilate the poem as to express its metre adequately by the voice. The living voice is the only revealer, as the ear is the only true judge, of metre.
In “Confessions” (p. [7]), the waking of the sick man, his confusion, his uncertainty whether he has heard aright, and his repetition of the words of his visitor, are given with trochaic movement, while his own conviction and answer are given in iambics; yet his story, possibly on account of the tenderness of recollections, frequently returns to the trochaic movement.
In the same way, to his question
“... Is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?”
he gives a slightly trochaic effect as a recognition of his own sick condition. A positive settling of the question by his own illustration is indicated by the emphasis of the iambic movement in the next line.
These are illustrations only. Two persons who have thoroughly assimilated the spirit of a poem, may not completely agree concerning its metre. It is not necessary nor best that they should. There are delicate variations which show spontaneously the difference in the realization of the two readers.
Such personal variations, however, which result from peculiar experiences and types of character, must not be confused with the careless breaking of the metre which we hear from all our actors and public readers. The latter is the result of ignorance and lack of understanding and realization. The late Henry A. Clapp, criticizing a prominent actor in “Julius Cæsar,” broke forth in a kind of despair and said: “After all, where could he go to find adequate methods for the development of a true sense of metre?”